Happy Groundhog Day!

Has your Groundhog Day been great?  I hope so.  It has been pretty good here.  I made it outside and enjoyed some beautiful weather.  Bits of green are poking their way through the dirt, teasing at the possibility of flowers arriving soon-ish.  I even managed to knit a bit.  

Little, by little, I'm getting the sweater to the point I want it to be by Monday night, but even if I don't get it there by then, it will be alright.  It would just be nice to have it joined below the armpits for a very long Tuesday. 

It Doesn't Repeat Itself, But it Kinda Rhymes

I get ideas.  It's probably for the best that some of my sparks of inspiration extinguish themselves as quickly as they ignite.  Occasionally, however, I see some of them through.  In this instance, I only saw part of it through, (although the other parts are more tangential, and certainly don't matter for the rest of this story) and past the deadline, of course.  

Last year, I purchased a pattern collection with some birthday money.  Not that I disliked the rest of the book, in fact, after flipping through, I can see myself knitting several of them, but I really only bought it for three of something like thirty patterns.  Anyway, at first glance, I thought one of the patterns resembled a scaled-down, miniaturized, simplified version of a sweater a friend had knit for herself.  There you are, millions of miles away through all of those tubes of the internet, and you see where this is going.  You know me a little bit, and you know if I see something like this, I will feel compelled to knit this for my friend.  

I cast on, and slowly, I made progress.  Why so slowly, you wonder?  Well, I quickly spotted a problem with the pattern, and I didn't want to have to fix it.  The closer I got to the error-riddled section, the more I slowed, and the less I worked on it.  I occasionally looked at the clearly wrong colorwork chart and tried to figure out how to fix it.  I thought I had an answer.  The chart is worked over twenty-four stitches for thirteen rows.  It looked as though it should have been worked from stitches thirteen through twenty-four and then one through twelve.  It made me tired just thinking about it.  To compound this, I ought to mention that for this section, you are working back-and-forth instead of in the round, so odd rows of the chart are read right-to-left and even rows left-to-right.  I think it is accurate to say that working this chart in this manner while trying to compensate for these errors is probably a greater burden than I should place on my will to live.  So, I copied the chart, cut it up the middle, and made the first half the new second half.  You know what?  Yep, it wasn't right, either.  At this point, I already had the chart copied, cut out, and cut in half, so I tried something else.  I made the first half of the chart the second half, but I rotated it 180 degrees, and it worked.  I don't know how they made the error that they did in putting together this pattern, but there you go.  

While I knew that I would not make my self-imposed deadline, I moved on with the knitting and thought of my friend.  When she knit her sweater, that pattern had many problems, too.  She worked through them, and the sweater looked great, but I'm pretty sure the pattern remains on her "Would Not Recommend" list.  I composed the note to accompany this many times in my head while I knit.  I shouldn't do that.  It so often paralyzes me as I try to find the right words, and by the time I to put pen to paper, my note has morphed into inky awkwardness, something I will feel embarrassed about whenever I think about it over the years.      

So, while it isn't exactly a miniaturized replica of the original, people-sized version of the sweater, it kinda rhymes.   

In a surprise move, I went ahead and mailed this off instead of waiting until the end of the year.  I know, shocker, eh?  Hey, I had to try to do something as right as I could this year.  Speaking of, how is your year thus far?